Opium Poppy Cultivation Research Articles

Mapping Opium Poppy Cultivation: Socioeconomic Insights from Satellite Imagery

Over 30 million people globally consume illicit opiates. In recent decades, Afghanistan has accounted for 70–90% of the world’s illicit supply of opium. This production provides livelihoods to millions of Afghans, while also funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to insurgent groups every year, exacerbating corruption and insecurity, and impeding development. Remote sensing and field surveys are currently used in official estimates of total poppy cultivation area. These aggregate estimates are not suited to study the local socioeconomic conditions surrounding cultivation. Few avenues exist to generate comprehensive, fine-grained data under poor security conditions, without the use of costly surveys or data collection efforts. Here, we develop and test a new unsupervised approach to mapping cultivation using only freely available satellite imagery. For districts accounting for over 90% of total cultivation, our aggregate estimates track official statistics closely (correlation coefficient of 0.76 to 0.81). We combine these predictions with other grid-level data sources, finding that areas with poppy cultivation have poorer outcomes such as infant mortality and education, compared to areas with exclusively other agriculture. Surprisingly, poppy-growing areas have better healthcare accessibility. We discuss these findings, the limitations of mapping opium poppy cultivation, and associated ethical concerns.

ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT FOR ILLICIT CROPS HAS NOT SUCCEEDED AND CAN NEVER SUCCEED

Thirty years ago an illicit crop containment policy called Alternative Development (AD), supported by UNODC and some developed countries commenced with fanfare, funds and optimism. It claimed to be a humane way of weaning illicit crop cultivators, but followed in the wake of eradication. It is a policy of selective economic development of illicit crop growing areas, excluding contiguous poor areas. Despite the prominence given to AD and the years spent in nurturing it there is no success at all. No statistical data is available of how many hectares of illicit crop have been permanently removed. On the other hand illicit cultivation of all drug crops keeps increasing. Most and of immediate concern is that, despite optimism of UNGASS 2017 and other NGOs, opium production in Afghanistan rose by 43 per cent to 4,800 metric tons in 2016 compared with 2015 levels. The area under opium poppy cultivation also increased to 201,000 hectares (ha) in 2016, a rise of 10 per cent compared with 183,000 ha in 2015. The higher production can be explained by the larger area under opium poppy cultivation, but the most important driver is the higher opium yield per hectare.

Drugs Statement, Opium Poppy Cultivation and Cropping Season in Afghanistan (2006-2022)

This article discusses the variables that contribute to drug trafficking and usage in Afghanistan as well as the illegal drug cultivation taking place there, the money generated there, the financial advantages of using drugs, the international market, and these aspects. The prevention of drug-related crimes and measures to stop drug usage and trafficking in Afghanistan have also been mentioned.

Between necessity and compulsion: opium poppy cultivation and the exigencies of survival in Badakhshan, Afghanistan

ABSTRACT Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Badakhshan, a borderland province in the northeast of Afghanistan, the paper explores the role that opium poppy cultivation has played in a marginal high-altitude economy. Framed by the analytic of ‘narco-frontiers’ and the puzzle of the persistence of small farmers in uneven agrarian transitions, the paper investigates the diversity of market and non-market institutions that operate across the means of production of opium. Rather than seeing opium poppy production as the vanguard of an agrarian transition, it is suggested that it is more of a rearguard action to ensure survival.

Land-System Changes and Migration Amidst the Opium Poppy Collapse in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico (2016-2020).

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10745-022-00388-4.

Prohibition on Opium Poppy Cultivation in Afghanistan:

Afghanistan is home to the largest illicit drug industry in the world. The depth, influence, and impact of its narco-economy remain unparalleled. Illicit drug production has become a dominant feature of Afghanistan’s landscape. The opium economy is pervasive and deeply entrenched. Afghanistan's opium economy has become the source of security rather than the state. Therefore, the degree of dependence on the opium economy has thus become unprecedented in the modern history of drug production. The dependence means any immediate attempt toward opium poppy prohibition/eradication will result in political and socioeconomic crises not only in Afghanistan but the transit states in the region as well. In context of narco-economy, this paper expostulate that the construction of security in traditional and nontraditional discourse are linear, i.e. detached from reality or suffers from moralistic constraint, and therefore, needs to be revisited in line with ground reality of Afghanistan and transit states at large. Deviating from conventional literature on drug-security nexus, the paper argues that a complete prohibition of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan is by far a larger security concern than its retention. This research paper, therefore, takes a cursory examination of the security implications and challenges that may ensue as a result of a diminished production capacity of Afghanistan’s opium economy either experienced through complete prohibition, eradication programs or through natural calamity.

TransAttention U-Net for Semantic Segmentation of Poppy

This work represents a new attempt to use drone aerial photography to detect illegal cultivation of opium poppy. The key of this task is the precise segmentation of the poppy plant from the captured image. To achieve segmentation mask close to real data, it is necessary to extract target areas according to different morphological characteristics of poppy plant and reduce complex environmental interference. Based on RGB images, poppy plants, weeds, and background regions are separated individually. Firstly, the pixel features of poppy plant are enhanced using a hybrid strategy approach to augment the too-small samples. Secondly, the U-Shape network incorporating the self-attention mechanism is improved to segment the enhanced dataset. In this process, the multi-head self-attention module is enhanced by using relative position encoding to deal with the special morphological characteristics between poppy stem and fruit. The results indicated that the proposed method can segmented out the poppy plant precisely.

Success Factors of Cross-Border Agricultural Investments for Opium Poppy Alternative Project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative

Cross-border agricultural investments (CBAIs) are considered to be an essential strategy that is expected to bridge the gap between poverty reduction and rural development in marginalized regions. Agricultural investments serve as a necessary indicator of the performance of international cooperation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It is of great significance to summarize the success factors of Chinese investors under this initiative and, more importantly, to improve the sustainability of CBAI projects and associated rural development. Extensive opium poppy cultivation is a barrier to poverty reduction in marginalized communities in less-developed countries such as Laos and Myanmar. The CBAIs in the opium poppy alternative (OPA) project conducted by Chinese agricultural companies aim to reduce drug crop cultivation and rural poverty based on a perspective of economic development. However, little is known about how participating companies cooperate with ex-poppy farmers to achieve investment success. In this study, we adopted case interviews and questionnaire surveys from Chinese agricultural companies in the China–Myanmar–Laos border region, with the aim to explore the success factors of CBAIs in the OPA project under China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The results indicated that the success of agricultural companies involved in the OPA project depended on three key factors, including (1) institutional and employee capacity building, (2) responses to policy and market incentives, and (3) support for the participation of ex-poppy farmers and community development. Our findings contribute to the theoretical and practical understanding of capacity improvements for foreign investors in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and shed light on the support of international agricultural cooperation for rural livelihood improvement.

Application of linear spectral mixed pixel decomposition technology in extracting the spatial distribution of illicit opium poppy cultivation

To determine the spatial distribution of illicit poppy cultivation hyperspectral image processing is employed. The real-world scenario of poppy leaves mixed with other plant leaves is simulated in the laboratory. The linear spectral mixed pixel decomposition method is employed and its application in determining the spatial distribution of poppy cultivation is studied. For this purpose, the method of interactive endmember extraction is used and the object types are limited to: poppy leaves, soil and other plant leaves. This aims at reducing systematic errors as well as human errors that are caused by complex classifaction steps and the large number of samples. The results show that the linear spectral mixed pixel decomposition method successfully separates the target (poppy leaves) from a complex background. The distribution of poppy leaves is clearly visible.

Development of SSR and SNP markers for identifying opium poppy.

Papaver somniferum L. (opium poppy) is the original plant of heroin, which is a major narcotic drug, and this plant has brought great harm to human health. However, the ban on opium poppy cultivation and trafficking is facing great challenges because of abnormal profits. Therefore, rapid and accurate identification is important to address the abovementioned problems. In this study, eleven simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers and two single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers were mined to distinguish opium poppy from other six Papaver species. These molecular markers were further verified through a large number of plant materials of these seven Papaver species. An excellent multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) system that simultaneously amplifies the three of eleven SSR markers was developed, which effectively improves the efficiency and speed of identification. The present research is of great implication for identifying and investigating the illegal cultivation and trafficking of opium poppy.

Low-Altitude Remote Sensing Opium Poppy Image Detection Based on Modified YOLOv3

Poppy is a special medicinal plant. Its cultivation requires legal approval and strict supervision. Unauthorized cultivation of opium poppy is forbidden. Low-altitude inspection of poppy illegal cultivation through unmanned aerial vehicle is featured with the advantages of time-saving and high efficiency. However, a large amount of inspection image data collected need to be manually screened and analyzed. This process not only consumes a lot of manpower and material resources, but is also subjected to omissions and errors. In response to such a problem, this paper proposed an inspection method by adding a larger-scale detection box on the basis of the original YOLOv3 algorithm to improve the accuracy of small target detection. Specifically, ResNeXt group convolution was utilized to reduce the number of model parameters, and an ASPP module was added before the small-scale detection box to improve the model’s ability to extract local features and obtain contextual information. The test results on a self-created dataset showed that: the mAP (mean average precision) indicator of the Global Multiscale-YOLOv3 model was 0.44% higher than that of the YOLOv3 (MobileNet) algorithm; the total number of parameters of the proposed model was only 13.75% of that of the original YOLOv3 model and 35.04% of that of the lightweight network YOLOv3 (MobileNet). Overall, the Global Multiscale-YOLOv3 model had a reduced number of parameters and increased recognition accuracy. It provides technical support for the rapid and accurate image processing in low-altitude remote sensing poppy inspection.

HIV-1 phylodynamic analysis among people who inject drugs in Pakistan correlates with trends in illicit opioid trade.

Pakistan is considered by the World Health Organization to currently have a “concentrated” HIV-1 epidemic due to a rapid rise in infections among people who inject drugs (PWID). Prevalence among the country’s nearly 105,000 PWID is estimated to be 37.8% but has been shown to be higher in several large urban centers. A lack of public health resources, the common use of professional injectors and unsafe injection practices are believed to have fueled the outbreak. Here we evaluate the molecular characteristics of HIV-1 sequences (n = 290) from PWID in several Pakistani cities to examine transmission dynamics and the association between rates of HIV-1 transmission with regards to regional trends in opioid trafficking. Tip-to-tip (patristic) distance based phylogenetic cluster inferences and BEAST2 Bayesian phylodynamic analyses of time-stamped data were performed on HIV-1 pol sequences generated from dried blood spots collected from 1,453 PWID as part of a cross-sectional survey conducted in Pakistan during 2014/2015. Overall, subtype A1 strains were dominant (75.2%) followed by CRF02_AG (14.1%), recombinants/unassigned (7.2%), CRF35_AD (2.1%), G (1.0%) and C (0.3%). Nearly three quarters of the PWID HIV-1 sequences belonged to one of five distinct phylogenetic clusters. Just below half (44.4%) of individuals in the largest cluster (n = 118) did seek help injecting from professional injectors which was previously identified as a strong correlate of HIV-1 infection. Spikes in estimated HIV-1 effective population sizes coincided with increases in opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s western neighbor. Structured coalescent analysis was undertaken in order to investigate the spatial relationship of HIV-1 transmission among the various cities under study. In general terms, our analysis placed the city of Larkana at the center of the PWID HIV-1 epidemic in Pakistan which is consistent with previous epidemiological data.

Opium poppy in Afghanistan: The determinants of cultivation

In this article we examine increasing opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan since 2001. First, we discuss the historical background for the emergence and spread of opium production in Afghanistan in the 20th century and its current spatial distribution. Then we proceed with our statistical analysis. Our results show that the intensity of violent conflict (which we proxy by the number of military casualties in a calendar year) and the farm gate price of opium are positively correlated with the increase in opium cultivation. We find that a 1% increase in conflict intensity leads to 0,2% increase in the land under opium poppy cultivation the following season. Given the magnitude of the increase in the intensity of conflict in Afghanistan in 2010s these effects seem to be very significant. Our findings are in line with existing research on the topic. Higher conflict intensity and the expansion of the conflict zone may create conditions, where opium cultivation is a low-risk activity and may be preferable to the production of other agricultural goods, with southern regions of Afghanistan being particularly affected both by higher conflict intensity and opium production. However, we note that our analysis is constrained by data quality and availability and should be viewed as capturing some of the interconnection between the variables of our choice, but not strictly causal.

On the Frontiers of Development: Illicit Poppy and the Transformation of the Deserts of Southwest Afghanistan

The physical and political geography of the deserts of southwest Afghanistan have gone through dramatic change over the last two decades. Located on the periphery of irrigated lands settled by the Afghan state in the 1950s and 1960s, this area has been at the forefront of technical change in Afghan agricultural production since 2003. Initially settled by small numbers of households escaping drought in the 1990s, tracts of these former desert lands were captured by local elites and communities from the adjacent irrigated lands. Access to improved technologies, including deep wells and diesel pumps, and a buoyant opium price, led to dry rocky soils being transformed into agricultural land. Further encroachment of these former desert lands came in 2008 with the drive to curb opium production in those accessible irrigated areas where the Afghan state, and foreign military forces, coerced the rural population to abandon opium. These counternarcotics efforts evicted the land-poor from the centrally irrigated valleys of the provinces of Helmand, Farah and Kandahar, leaving them few options but to seek new lives in the former desert areas. For those that owned land in the former desert areas, this supply of relatively cheap labour, skilled in opium production, encouraged a further expansion in opium poppy cultivation. Even in the wake of repeated low yields between 2010 and 2014, and fluctuating opium prices, farmers in these former desert areas adapted and innovated, exploiting herbicides and solar-powered technology to reduce the costs of opium production, and further increased the amount of land under agriculture. As this paper argues, these former desert areas should not be seen as marginal and remote, far from the reaches of the development programs of the Afghan state and its donors, but understood as engines of growth integrated into the global economic system; these are areas that have been transformed by improved access to modern technologies and an entrepreneurial local population that has fully exploited the opportunities illegal opium production offers.

The Last Harvest? From the US Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis

For decades, farmers in the most marginalised regions of Mexico have depended for survival on the illicit cultivation of opium poppy for the US heroin market. In 2017 they could earn up to 20,000 pesos ($950–$1,050 dollars) per kilo of opium, which channelled around 19 billion pesos ($1 billion dollars) into the country’s poorest communities, sustaining regional economies, religious ceremonies, and intra-community relations while stemming out-migration to Mexican cities and the US. With the recent upsurge in fentanyl use in the US, however, the demand for Mexican heroin has fallen sharply, meaning that farmers are now being paid around 6000 to 8000 pesos ($315–415 dollars) per kilo of raw opium. Thus the total money being paid to opium producing villages has dropped to an unprecedented low of 7 billion pesos ($370 million dollars). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two poppy-producing regions of Mexico – one in the State of Nayarit, one in the State of Guerrero – this article shows that today, farmers cannot make a profit from opium once fertilizers and other capital inputs have been taken into account; village economies are starting to dry up; and out-migration is on the up. But this economic emergency opens the possibility of wrestling Mexico’s opium-growing regions from the control of Mexico’s Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs). This article concludes by addressing several possible solutions to what we term ‘the Mexican Opium Crisis’ – including crop substitution or opium legalization for medicinal use – and evaluates how realistic they are in the Mexican context.

Improved UAV Opium Poppy Detection Using an Updated YOLOv3 Model.

Rapid detection of illicit opium poppy plants using UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) imagery has become an important means to prevent and combat crimes related to drug cultivation. However, current methods rely on time-consuming visual image interpretation. Here, the You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) network structure was used to assess the influence that different backbone networks have on the average precision and detection speed of an UAV-derived dataset of poppy imagery, with MobileNetv2 (MN) selected as the most suitable backbone network. A Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SPP) unit was introduced and Generalized Intersection over Union (GIoU) was used to calculate the coordinate loss. The resulting SPP-GIoU-YOLOv3-MN model improved the average precision by 1.62% (from 94.75% to 96.37%) without decreasing speed and achieved an average precision of 96.37%, with a detection speed of 29 FPS using an RTX 2080Ti platform. The sliding window method was used for detection in complete UAV images, which took approximately 2.2 sec/image, approximately 10× faster than visual interpretation. The proposed technique significantly improved the efficiency of poppy detection in UAV images while also maintaining a high detection accuracy. The proposed method is thus suitable for the rapid detection of illicit opium poppy cultivation in residential areas and farmland where UAVs with ordinary visible light cameras can be operated at low altitudes (relative height < 200 m).

Investigation of the farmers' perceptions and participation in opium poppy cultivation in the Northern Shan State, Myanmar

Investigation of the farmers' perceptions and participation in opium poppy cultivation in the Northern Shan State, Myanmar

Investigation of the farmers' perceptions and participation in opium poppy cultivation in the Northern Shan State, Myanmar

The interest for poppy cultivation in Myanmar is increasing due to an attractive income potential relative to other crops. The present study assessed farmers' perceptions of poppy cultivation, and participation in poppy- and non-poppy cultivation. Lack of law enforcement, large amounts of investments and higher profitability were some of the influencing factors for poppy cultivation in the poppy-growing region. In contrast, law enforcement was strictly implemented in the non-poppy growing region. Community development program was active in the non-poppy growing region, which had negative influence on the cultivation of poppy. The level of education significantly influenced farmers' perceptions regarding poppy cultivation. Alternative crops with high yield potential should be promoted. This study presents a new dimension on legal crop cultivation, poverty reduction, environmental protection and food security for policy development and implementation targeting suppression of illicit drug crop cultivation in Myanmar in particular and some other opium-producing countries in general.

Opium Poppy Detection Using Deep Learning

Opium poppies are a major source of traditional drugs, which are not only harmful to physical and mental health, but also threaten the economy and society. Monitoring poppy cultivation in key regions through remote sensing is therefore a crucial task; the location coordinates of poppy parcels represent particularly important information for their eradication by local governments. We propose a new methodology based on deep learning target detection to identify the location of poppy parcels and map their spatial distribution. We first make six training datasets with different band combinations and slide window sizes using two ZiYuan3 (ZY3) remote sensing images and separately train the single shot multibox detector (SSD) model. Then, we choose the best model and test its performance using 225 km2 verification images from Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), which exhibits a precision of 95% for a recall of 85%. The speed of our method is 4.5 km2/s on 1080TI Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This study is the first attempt to monitor opium poppies with the deep learning method and achieve a high recognition rate. Our method does not require manual feature extraction and provides an alternative way to rapidly obtain the exact location coordinates of opium poppy cultivation patches.

La otra montaña roja: El cultivo de la amapola en Guerrero

El estado de Guerrero es el primer cultivador de amapola en México y representa una de las principales zonas productoras de goma de opio en el mundo. La relevancia estratégica de esta situación contrasta con la pobreza de su análisis. Las ciencias sociales han dado a la cuestión de los cultivos ilícitos un tratamiento marginal, el cual suele restringirse a prescripciones normativas y oscila desde la criminología y el derecho penal, hasta la economía de los mercados ilegales. Este artículo aborda el tema en su dimensión propiamente política y de manera crítica, es decir, en contra del discurso oficial del prohibicionismo, el “combate al narcotráfico” o la “lucha anti-drogas”, con el fin de poder indagar, en cambio, acerca de las relaciones históricas que unen el tráfico de las drogas ilegales con las políticas del Estado mexicano y, en particular, los cultivos ilícitos con la principal institución encargada de su erradicación: el ejército. Es lo que nos proponemos hacer, a partir de un trabajo de investigación realizado en Guerrero sobre el cultivo de la amapola.